Category Archives: Trio Tracks

My favorite Trio tracks have documented many memorable musical moments from 2000 to 2004. Songs made their debut, found their fans, and were gradually refined or radically transformed.

However, sometimes the best part of Trio is playing a song – old or new, well known or obscure – and playing it very, very well. This became my mission throughout all of Season 5, with outstanding results, but up until then a specific pair of Season 3 tunes were the best example.

I remember very specifically burning them to CD and listening to them on the train ride to Elise’s house, and as soon as I arrived pushing the disc into her stereo, ignoring that one of the tunes was a touch explicit and Elise’s 10 year old brother was sitting on the floor playing video games. Not to mention that the cover in the middle of the two songs was “Untouchable Face.”

(Little did I suspect that years later I’d take him to a Dresden Dolls concert where backup dancers would pantomime giving each other back alley abortions, alternating the Charleston with pulling doll parts out from under their dresses. That made me feel so much better about blasting “Untouchable Face” in his living room.)

While surveying my Trios for this list of favorites tracks I decided against including the fully-mixed songs from the middle of Season 4. Though they appeared in Trio they didn’t adhere to the spirit of Trio – I built them piece by piece from a click track rather than recording them live.

Except for “Granted.”

“Granted” came to me in the middle of the night. I awoke, bolt upright, crying, and reached for a piece of paper. The next thing I remember was crossing out a line in the final verse, and the next thing after that was getting through a guitar/vocal version of the song in a single take.

What could be more quintessentially Trio than that?

After hearing the guitar/vocal I realized that a lot more had come to me than just the basic structure of the song. Without even thinking about it I added a lattice of background vocals and guitars around the original demo, replacing some of them in the coming days with more polished versions. The end result was one of my most professional-sounding tracks of all time, which wound up as the opening track of Trio Season 4, #2.

As a song “Granted” exists across opposing worlds – awake and asleep, alive and slipping away. Now you can hear it two different ways for the first time – fully polished and completely naked. At the core of each is my voice, hoarse at 3am from waking up crying, singing words straight from a legal pad pockmarked with arrows and crossouts.

Many songs – especially pop songs – are distinct because of their arrangement, or their production, and when they’re stripped down to just an acoustic guitar they are entirely unarresting. As covers those sorts of songs are only as effective as you know how to make them; you have to bring your own strong sense of interpretation and inertia to the song to keep it interesting for the listener.

Peter Mulvey‘s “Wings of the Ragman” is a different creature, maybe because of its aerobic, alternately-tuned guitar or it’s rapid, flowing melody. Or, maybe it’s something else. No matter what, my version of it from Trio Season 3, #6 is very nearly my favorite Trio recording of all time.

I’m straying from the script here – being indecisive. So, you get two songs instead of one.

Originally you were meant to get “Are You” from Trio Season 4, #4. However, listening to it tonight I was compelled to alter a flubbed change – editing it out in favor of a seamless transition.

The result sounded good, but that’s not what this highlights series has been about – I haven’t done any digital work to these recordings other than restoration, and occasional touch of reverb.

The irony is that “Are You” was intentionally imperfect – it bucked the trend of huge mixing projects that had overwhelmed an aborted Trio season that had began over a year before. “Are You” truly is a folk song – perhaps my only one – and at the time I resolved to keep it folky and untouched.

Songs start with something at their center – an experience, a feeling, a great line, or a snippet of melody. Yet, once they’re fully formed they wind up attached to other contexts and meanings.

From that perspective I can understand why some songwriters personify their songs; Tori Amos, for example, refers to them as her “girls,” and ascribes assertive opinions and stubborn tempers to each one.

I don’t know that “Lost” has ever talked back to me, but it’s certainly a character. It came to me in a single blast in the middle of a Journalism class in Randell hall on May 16 of my Freshmen year, scribbled straight through on a single sheet of lined paper.

The guitar arrangement came later, but in the same lightning bolt fashion – so perfect in my head that I recorded it four times in a row before I felt like I captured some part of it on tape.

Then I promptly forgot it.

Really it was a little more complicated than that. I was writing so many songs at the time that “Lost” didn’t really stick out, and then I broke my collarbone and was forced to go on a brief hiatus from playing. And, when I had healed enough to play again I had a backlog of lyrics waiting to transform into songs.

By the time I returned to “Lost” it was months after it was originally written, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to play its chorus. The chords sounded simple on my four recordings, but I couldn’t quite get the fingerings.

Over the years “Lost” has stuck with me through ups and downs. Playing with cellos, in different keys, segueing into “Lucky Star,” and changing from 3/4 to 4/4. Recently I feel like maybe we’ve parted ways … at least for a little while.

(I bet some of you Googlers would love to see some chords here. Unfortunately, I haven’t played this in three years and I have work in the morning. I do recall that I’m capoed relatively high – perhaps seventh fret? I’ll come back with a transcription as soon as I’m able.)

I often remark that I’m not much of a musical fan, but I freely admit that one of my lifelong dreams is to play Hedwig. That said, I’m actually a much better vocal fit for his other half, Tommy Gnosis, as voiced in the film by Hedwig co-originator Stephen Trask.

After I built my top fifteen list I was a little puzzled at the placement of this track on the upper half … it’s not nearly as definitive as some of the songs that I’ve highlighted so far. Yet, every re-listen proves its place: I wish every Trio could stay faithful to the framework of a tune while remaining this carefree and spirited.

When I had my tonsils removed in 2002 I had no way of knowing how it would impact my singing. I waited, impatiently for my throat to heal enough that I could sing.

As my first sans-tonsil week ended my voice started to return to normal. At first I sounded weird and too-open – like Bjork. Higher notes were less constrained, lower ones more boomy.

I decided that I had to document my altered vocals with a Trio, but with my singing handicapped my song choices were limited. As a result, on the few songs I could sing I spent more time rehearsing my guitar parts than vocals – my voice wouldn’t stand up to repeated tries at each song, so my fingers had to deliver their peak performance.

Trio can act as a snapshot, catching songs as they transform from one form to another. That’s certainly the case with this recording of “Typical,” from Trio Season 2, #13.

At the time the song was a year and a half old, and it still hadn’t truly found its niche, but as soon as I ad-libbed my first staccato between-verse riff while recording this Trio I knew I had found the way “Typical” was meant to be played.

While researching my Trio favorites I came across a recording I had completely forgotten – a demo of “Relief” recorded just minutes after I finished writing it.

The demo didn’t sound too much like the song I play today – the guitar rhythms never solidified, and the vocal wasn’t as distinct.

This version of “Relief,” from Trio Season 1, #8, was recorded just seven days later. You can clearly hear that in those seven days the song resolved very clearly into the form it’s stayed in for the past seven years.

When I wrote it in 1998, “World In My Hand” was my first “hit,” in a manner of speaking.

At the time I had only been writing songs for a few months, and only playing for about a year, but when I wrote the lyrics out on the first page of my new poetry notebook I knew I had tapped into something both more personal and more universal than anything I had previously written.

As my songwriting has become more and more refined my older songs have a tendency to drop off of my setlists – especially songs I wrote before college. Yet, no matter how much my songs evolve, this one will always be a favorite.

Just a brief write-up for tonight’s Trio favorite, as I’ve been awake just about twenty-four hours, which included a lot of Trio remastering, walking, playing guitar, and being a miserable Philadelphia sports fan.

All three songs in the trio were covers of songs I spent a lot of time listening to during my trip to see Tori in Boston a month before. This very well may have been meant to be a practice take right up until I made it through the song, whereas the following two – more-rehearsed – covers wound up being train wrecks. I take special delight in how well-formed and supported the vocals are for the time period.

Tune in tomorrow for another Trio highlight, squeezed into my day somewhere between work and a jam with a new drummer (!).

Sometimes it takes someone else to hear the good in my own songs, and if it wasn’t for Trio that good would never come out.

Such was the case with “Colorblind,” which was one of the many songs I quickly tossed off in my post- Queen of Darkness period. I had so many songs to pay attention to at the time that quite a few of them slipped away (infamously, “This Long” wasn’t recovered until last November).

“Colorblind” was brought back to life this summer in anticipation of hanging out with Rabi in NYC, and now it’s become something it’s never been before – a solidified ballad that’s finally a comfortable part of my primary rotation of songs.

“Supposed To Be” is a narrative song, a peculiar blend of “Every Breath You Take” and “Old Apartment” that would seem alien in just about any set of mine.

It has a lot of chords, and a lot of words. I can’t tell you if I had even played the song once through before the Trio other than maybe for Erika in our living room – only to assure her that it wasn’t really about her, even though the character my narrator is… erm… attached to is clearly based on her.

The lack of rehearsal makes its placement as the final tune a brave one, but apparently I had nothing to worry about – “Supposed To Be” came out perfect in a single try – so much so that I’ve hardly ever played it since.

It may not be one of my favorite songs, but “Supposed To Be” is definitely one of my favorite Trio tracks of all time.

After a week of blogging at all hours of the day I realized that I had something more to offer to the internet than just words – I had songs. Just over a hundred, at the time. And, it was time for them to be heard as a regular part of Crushing Krisis:

As of this instant i have added a new weekly feature affectionately dubbed trio. … i will sit down in front of my computer and play a continuous live take of three songs … i’ll always play a trio of songs – no more and no less.

In the seven intervening years I’ve violated each of those introductory terms. Trio certainly didn’t stay weekly … at one point it went on a two-year hiatus! On the other hand, last November I posted nine Trios in a single month – some on consecutive days.

Furthermore, starting with the latter half of Season 3 I stopped recording all three songs in a continuous live take, instead working on them one by one. The first trio of Season 4 Trios were dubbed and mixed just like album tracks, though I have since abandoned the process (it was too time-consuming).

Finally, a handful of Trios have featured more than four songs – quite intentionally in the first season, but since then just as spontaneous extra tracks.

I’m due to start the sixth season of Trio in a few weeks, now armed with twice as many songs as I had when Trio first began.

While I am rehearsing behind the scenes for the new season I’ll also be counting down my fifteen favorite live Trio recordings from seasons one through four (since nearly all of five was a favorite), offering a la cart versions of each song as excerpted from a newly remastered mp3 version of the original Trio.

At the time “Crashing” was hardly a year old, and still a regular staple of my live sets. Since then it has sped up, slowed down, included piano, and quoted Destiny’s Child. However, through all of those recordings, its Trio debut has remained one of the most definitive, and one of my favorites.